Most everyone who lived here in the 1950s and 1960s has teary-eyed smog stories.

Ed Camarena remembers how upset his 5-year-old daughter was when she ran inside one smoggy day in 1964. They had just moved to Orange several weeks before.

“She yelled, ‘Who put those hills there?’ pointing to some hills, only 1? miles away,” he said. They had been hidden in a veil of smog for all the time they had lived there.

Camarena, the retired chief enforcement director for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, also recalls, like many of us, pulling over to the side of the road unable to drive because of smog stinging his eyes.

And, at times, there were days when it was a lot worse.

Take one very ugly day 70 years ago this week when smog was so bad that visibility dropped to almost nothing in parts of Los Angeles.

The area that so prided itself on sunshine, snow-capped mountains and orchards lush with oranges had air that looked more like smoke-choked Pittsburgh.

On that horrible day — July 26, 1943 — Southern California baked in temperatures from 93 in Los Angeles to 108 in Ontario. The air was enveloped in a “gas attack, that left thousands of Angelenos with irritated eyes, noses and throats,” wrote the Los Angeles Times of the next day.

It was a perfect storm: very hot temperatures caused an inversion layer (separating cool air above and hot air below) trapping pollutants near the surface.

“Visibility was cut to less than three blocks in some sections of the business district,” wrote the Times on July 27. “Office workers found the noxious fumes almost unbearable. One municipal judge threatened to adjourn court this morning if the conditions persist.”

Today we know what caused it — volatile organic compounds cooking in the hot sun, mixing with nitrogen oxides, creating ozone. It was the midst of World War II, with rubber and aircraft plants running round the clock in Los Angeles County and Kaiser’s newly opened steel mill in Fontana in full operation.

With that kind of industrial activity, air pollution was hardly a surprise.

But Los Angeles Councilman Carl Rasmussen demanded something be done immediately, warning the city would soon become a “Deserted Village” if the air didn’t clear.

A day later, with the smog siege lessening, George M. Uhl, Los Angeles health officer, declared industry was the reason for the dirty air adding that atmospheric conditions also played a role.

The Times article also assured readers ironically that “the fumes are not believed dangerous to health.”

Camarena, the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s chief “smog cop” for a number of years, said the movement to clear the air was slow in starting, though days like July 26, 1943 certainly starting things rolling.

Late in 1943, the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors created its Smoke and Fumes Commission, with an LA County air pollution district formed in 1947. It wasn’t until 1976 that the AQMD, overseeing the entire Los Angeles air basin, took over cleaning the air with the state Air Resources Board.

Perhaps the biggest breakthrough came at the hands of Caltech biochemist Arie Haagen-Smit refuting the accepted view that the villain in our bad air was industrial pollution.

Research by Haagen-Smit ultimately proved that while there are indeed multiple sources for smog, it’s our beloved automobile that plays the most significant role. Ultimately, the catalytic converter, lead-free gasoline and regular auto emissions tests, among other remedies, have helped reduce the production of raw materials for smog.

Has it worked enough? On that July day in 1943, there was no test equipment to measure the air, but the worst day on record was in 1955 in which an ozone measurement of .68 parts per million was logged over 60 minutes.

The last third-stage smog alert (part of a series of daily alerts that displayed the severity of pollution) was recorded in Upland on June 27, 1974, when ozone hit .51 ppm.

By comparison, the highest ozone recorded by the AQMD for any one-hour period in 2013 has been .15 ppm. And this comes despite a regional population that has grown from 4.8 million in 1950 to about 17 million.

Has the war on smog been won? Have all the newer rules that changed the composition of paint, reduced emissions from power plants, regulated water heaters, captured fumes during gasoline deliveries, and, yes, limiting the number of fire rings at the beach, put us over the top?

Work remains to be done.

“It’s better but it’s still there,” said Camarena, who still serves as a hearing officer for the AQMD. “There are still significant health impacts from air pollution, and that’s going to require further controls on sources here.”

If you need motivation on supporting efforts to clean the air, check out the book “Smogtown” by Chip Jacobs and William J. Kelly, describing smog as “the beast you couldn’t stab.” Their description of those terrible smoggy times of the past brings back unpleasant memories for those who lived through it and helps us appreciate that the battle is not over:

“Inhaling the viscous stuff socked folks with instant allergies whether they had them before or not, eyes welled, throats rasped, hands grasped for hankies and for answers,”